Skinny to Strong

My love affair with P90X lasted for about 3 months before I gave up. Why? Because I was simply not seeing any more results. I am not saying P90X is flawed. Neither am I endorsing it. It just did not work for me. I think P90X works for people who are very fit at some point in their life, but have since become overweight. Even in the infomercial for P90X, they mostly show people who were rowers or athletes or runners or well trained people who slacked and then took up P90X and saw good results. I am not one of them. I was never fit. Never lifted weights, never ran more than 100 yards never lifted more than 30 lbs using any known muscle nor was in rowing, boxing, tennis or any other physical activity ever. I just have a weak body. And it has always been that way. So I could not use P90X to get back to my fit state. After discovering that it is not working well for me I started searching for some workouts for skinny folks like me. I came across stronglifts . This workout was different. A...

I first started recording P90X stats from september 2008 onwards. But all the data that I wrote in a notebook went missing. So I stared to record them online in google spreadsheet. This started sometime on december 6, 2008. This was also the time at which point I have finished phase I of P90X and just decided to split the total time into 2. When I first started P90X I was barely able to do 4 pull-ups. It is surprising enough that I can do any pull-ups at all ;). I was able to do about 10 push-ups at that time. By early december of 2008, I was able to do 7 pull-ups and get around 20 push-ups! That is a great progress isn't it? Instead of going through each workout and how much I did I will just copy paste the progress stats from my spreadsheet here. The first one is for Chest Shoulders and Triceps. Notice how I have 1 date above and another below? That is how I used to split the workout into 2 parts for 2 weeks. The time is whe...

Having done some dumbell curls and seeing no results at all, I decided to try some professional workouts. One sunday as I was flipping channels I came across a P90X infomercial. I know to be very wary of any infomercial but I decided to try that out anyway. The main reason for trying it out was because I did not know of any exercises that I should be doing. I did not know what a set or rep meant. So I thought this will be like a personal trainer for me. Although P90X was supposed to be done by people who are already kind of fit, I decided to give it a try.  I brought a bunch of dumbells and got down to business. The first few weeks were brutal. I was barely able to finish all the exercises. The workouts are usually 60 mins but I took long breaks and in the end it took more like 90 mins and I was barely able to do any exercises towards the end. I went on like this for a few days and they proved to be very tiring and I was always weak to do any other activity. I continued with the ...